As was observed in dealing with children’s imaginative activity, this primitive child-lore, like its prototype in folk-lore, is largely a product of a naïve vivid fancy. In assigning the relations of things and their reasons, a child’s mind does not make use of abstract conceptions. It does not talk about “relation,” but pictures out the particular relation it wants to express by a figurative expression, as in apperceiving the juxtaposition of moon and star as mamma and baby. So it does not talk of abstract force, but figures some concrete form of agency, as in explaining the wind by the idea of somebody’s waving a big fan somewhere. This first crude attempt of the child to envisage the world is, indeed, largely mythological, proceeding by the invention of concrete and highly pictorial ideas of fairies, giants and their doings.
The element of thought comes in with the recognition of the real as such, and with the application of the products of young phantasy to comprehending and explaining this reality. And here we see how this primitive child-thought, though it remains instinct with glowing imagery, differentiates itself from pure fancy. This last knows no restraint, and aims only at the delight of its spontaneous play-like movements, whereas thought is essentially the serious work of realising and understanding what exists. The contrast is seen plainly enough if we compare the mental attitude of the child when he is frankly romancing, giving out now and again a laugh, which shows that he himself fully recognises the absurdity of his talk, with his attitude when in gravest of moods he is calling upon his fancy to aid reason in explaining some puzzling fact.
How early this splitting of the child’s imaginative activity into these two forms, the playful and the thoughtful, takes place is not, I think, very easy to determine. Many children at least are apt at first to take all that is told them as gospel. To most of them about the age of three and four, I suspect, fairyland, if imagined at all, is as much a reality as the visible world. The disparity of its contents, the fairies, dragons and the rest, with those of the world of sense does not trouble their mind, the two worlds not being as yet mentally juxtaposed and dove-tailed one into the other. It is only later when the desire to understand overtakes and even passes the impulse to frame bright and striking images, and, as a result of this, critical reflexion applies itself to the nursery legends and detects their incongruity with the world of every-day perception, that a clear distinction comes to be drawn between reality and fiction, what exists and can (or might) be verified by sense, and what is only pictured by the mind.
With this preliminary peep into the modus operandi of children’s thought, let us see what sort of ideas of things they fashion.
Beginning with their ideas of natural objects we find, as has been hinted, the influence of certain predominant tendencies. Of these the most important is the impulse to think of what is far off, whether in space or time, and so unobservable, as like what is near and observed. Along with this tendency, or rather as one particular development of it, there goes the disposition already illustrated, to vivify nature, to personify things and so to assimilate their behaviour to the child’s own, and to explain the origin of things by ideas of making and aiming at some purpose. Since, at the same time that these tendencies are still dominant, the child by his own observation and by such instruction as he gets, is gaining insight into the ‘how,’ the mechanism of things, we find that his cosmology is apt to be a quaint jumble of the scientific and the mythological. Thus the boy C. tried to conceive of the divine creation of men as a mechanical process with well-marked stages—the fashioning of stone men, iron men, and then real men. In many cases we can see that a nature-myth comes in to eke out the deficiencies of mechanical insight. Thus, the production of thunder and other strange and inexplicable phenomena is referred, as by the savage, and even by many so-called civilised men and women, to the direct interposition of a supernatural agency. The theological idea with which children are supplied is apt to shape itself into that of a capricious and awfully clever demiurgos, who not only made the world-machine but alters its working as often as he is disposed. With this idea of a supernatural agent there is commonly combined that of a natural process as means employed, as when thunder is supposed to be caused by God’s treading heavily on the floor of the sky. Contradictions are not infrequent, the mythological impulse sometimes alternating with a more distinctly scientific impulse to grasp the mechanical process, as when wind is sometimes thought of, as caused by a big fan, and sometimes, e.g., when heard moaning in the night, endowed with life and feeling.
I shall make no attempt to give a methodical account of children’s thoughts about nature. I suspect that a good deal more material will have to be collected before a complete description of these thoughts is possible. I shall content myself with giving a few samples of their ideas so far as my own studies have thrown light on them.
With respect to the make or substance of things children are, I believe, disposed to regard all that they see as having the resistant quality of solid material substance.
At first, that is to say after the child has had experience enough of seeing and touching things at the same time to know that the two commonly go together, he believes that all which he sees is tangible or substantial. Thus he will try to touch shadows, sunlight dancing on the wall, and picture forms. This tendency to “reify,” or make things of, his visual impressions shows itself in pretty forms, as when the little girl M., one year eleven months old, “gathered sunlight in her hands and put it on her face”. The same child about a month earlier expressed a wish to wash some black smoke. This was the same child that tried to make the wind behave by making her mother’s hair tidy; and her belief in the material reality of the wind was shown by her asking her mother to lift her up high so that she might see the wind. This last, it is to be noted, was an inference from touching and resisting to seeing.[[45]] Wind, it has been well remarked, keeps something of its substantiality for all of us long after shadows have become the type of unreality, proving that the experience of resisting something lies at the root of our sense of material substance. That older children believe in the wind as a living thing seems suggested by the readiness with which they get up a kind of play-tussle with it. That wind even in less fanciful moments is reified is suggested by the following story from the Worcester collection. A girl aged nine was looking out and seeing the wind driving the snow in the direction of a particular town, Milbury: whereupon she remarked, “I’d like to live down in Milbury”. Asked why, she replied, “There must be a lot of wind down there, it’s all blowing that way”.
Children, as may be seen in this story, are particularly interested in the movements of things. Movement is the clearest and most impressive manifestation of life. All apparently spontaneous or self-caused movements are accordingly taken by children, as by primitive man, to be the sign of life, the outcome of something analogous to their own impulses. Hence the movements of falling leaves, of running water, of feathers and the like are specially suggestive of life. Wind owes much of its vitality, as seen in the facile personification of it by the poet, to its apparently uncaused movements. Some children in the Infant Department of a London Board School were asked what things in the room were alive, and they promptly replied the smoke and the fire. Big things moving by an internal mechanism of which the child knows nothing, more especially engines, are of course endowed with life. A little girl of thirteen months offered a biscuit to a steam-tram, and the author of The Invisible Playmate tells us that his little girl wanted to stroke the “dear head” of a locomotive. A child has been known to ask whether a steam-engine was alive. In like manner, savages on first seeing the self-moving steamer take it for a big animal. The fear of a dog at the sight of an unfamiliar object appearing to move of itself, as a parasol blown along the ground by the wind, seems to imply a rudiment of the same impulse to interpret self-movement as a sign of life.[[46]]
The child’s impulse to give life to moving things may lead him to overlook the fact that the movement is caused by an external force, and this even when the force is exerted by himself. The boy C. on finding the cushion he was sitting upon slipping from under him in consequence of his own wriggling movements pronounced it alive. In like manner children, as suggested above, ascribe life to their moving playthings. Thus, C.’s sister when five years old stopped one day trundling her hoop, and turning to her mother, exclaimed: “Ma, I do think this hoop must be alive, it is so sensible: it goes where I want it to”. Another little girl two and a quarter years old on having a string attached to a ball put into her hand, and after swinging it round mechanically, began to notice the movement of the ball, and said to herself, “Funny ball!” In both these cases, although the movement was directly caused by the child, it was certainly in the first case, and apparently in the second, attributed to the object.